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Libya and the Domestic Sphere

… there is a segregation of talking heads–they tend to be either foreign or domestic. Those who specialize in foreign or military affairs tend to know little or nothing about what’s happening within our borders. Those who specialize in domestic politics tend not to understand that vital impact on our national security that a country like Pakistan, for example, plays. Those who’ve argued for Libya intervention have been, for the most part, those who do not focus on the waning economic power of the United States, the need to rethink our long-term deficits, the need to invest in our future. They tend to think more about the Middle East than the Middle West. That leads to skewed priorities.

I certainly resemble Klein’s remark. My opposition to our Libyan intervention isn’t rooted in firsthand experience of the Maghreb, or a decades-long immersion in Middle Eastern politics. My interests and knowledge tilt toward the domestic scene, I’m more comfortable with the ins-and-outs of American politics than the complexities of the Israel-Palestine problem, and I’ve written much more about the deficit and health care in the last year than about the Arab world. I can raise questions about Libya, but I can’t pretend to have the answers.

But as Klein implies, there are advantages to a domestic perspective. To the extent that our intervention in Libya is really an attempt to “rehabilitate humanitarian hawkishness” for the 21st century and to establish the “responsibility to protect” as a central pillar of our foreign policy, it seems completely detached from the realities of America’s economic and fiscal situation. It’s a 1990s vision being revived in 2010s, and it’s unclear to me that the people championing it, both inside the administration and out, have come to grips with how much the world has changed since the days of Bosnia and Kosovo — how many more commitments the United States has now, how many more domestic challenges we face, and how (relatively) limited our resources have become.

I think that Mickey Kaus is right to suggest that the logic behind this intervention and the way it’s been conducted point toward a kind of “routinization of humanitarian war.” (As Kaus puts it: “You’ve got two wars going already? No need to change the president’s schedule to start a third. Tour Latin America. Talk about your NCAA brackets … I mean, you don’t call a press conference every time the police run a sobriety checkpoint do you? The relevant international governing bodies have already determined the appropriate application of force …”) If I thought that such a routinization — today, Libya; tomorrow, Ivory Coast; the next day, maybe Syria — were remotely plausible, I’d worry about the precedent being set. But given the constraints on American power at the moment and the fiscal wall we’re headed toward, I’m more worried that people in the Obama White House seem to think that it’s plausible — because that suggests our foreign policy is being made in fantasyland.

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About

Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at the Atlantic and a blogger for theatlantic.com. He is the author of "Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class" (Hyperion, 2005) and the co-author, with Reihan Salam, of "Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream" (Doubleday, 2008). He is the film critic for National Review.